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Email, as a means of electronically sending messages between two people, is said to have began at MIT in the 1960s. The system was crude, and basically amounted to different users leaving notes for each other stored on the same shared computer. This was a precursor to today's method of sending an email across a network, which, incidentally, was created not too much later.

The First Network Email

The backbone of our current email system began with ARPANET, near the end of 1971, by Ray Tomlinson, an ARPANET contractor working for Bolk Beranek and Newman. ARPANET was the network created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense during the Cold War. Tomlinson's goal was to take his existing basic messaging system, SNGMSG, and take it to the next logical evolution, indicating for a given message which user was at which of the network's computers.

The History and Evolution of Email

Below given a link in an infographic by Microsoft, which shows how Email has evolved over the last few decades.